“Let the beauty of what you love be what you do." Rumi
Few months ago, I was attending a Gold Coast User group meeting in Boca Raton. The presenter, Stacy Draper – a good friend of mine, just back from a MS SharePoint MVP event, gave me an evaluation copy of MOSS 2007. He advised me to look into SharePoint 2007 and Excel Services. Between work and other social commitments at my HOA board, I could not find time. My desire to explore Excel Services is very natural. I love Excel both a user and a developer. I will write about my experience with Excel Services, and share everything that I would discover on my way. Initially, I was not sure about the version of SharePoint 2007 that supported Excel Services. I happened to find the answer from Mauro Cardarelli’s blog on ‘MOSS 2007: Standard versus Enterprise’. I strongly suggest reading his blog entry to get full details on functionality across various versions. The focus of this entry is in Excel Services. For those of you interested in SharePoint installation, I highly recommend reading Tony Zink’s blog. He did a great job of sharing all steps with screen captures. It would have saved me a lot of time and energy if I had read it earlier. Tony mostly talks about SharePoint installation in VPC environment. However, if you are looking for installation in general then I encourage you to read Bill English’s blog. The topic of his blog entry is 'Installing a New Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Portal: Step-by-Step Instructions.' Enough said about MOSS 2007. Let us focus on Excel Services. Do not expect Excel Services as auto activated. I activated the services by going to Central Administration > Operations > Services on Server. Click on the Action column ‘Start’ to start these services. Notice that Excel Services are required on Farm. A quick way to check if the services are activated is by going to Central Administration > Application Management > Check Services Enabled in this Farm. SharePoint sites rely on Shared Services Provider (SSP) for providing Excel Services.Therefore, give special attention to configuration of Shared Services. Otherwise, you may spend extra time on that. Microsoft TechNet is a wonderful resource for any help with the configuration. In fact, it came to my rescue when I was stranded. I asked for help from one of our resident SharePoint guru; he blatantly said, “I have no clue.” SharePoint 2007 provides many clues on the main create SSP page. http:/…/sspdetails.aspx?task=Create I learned it the hard way; never try to create a SSP web application that uses Network Services. SSP is not going to recognize that web application. Simply put, just follow steps from TechNet article or the blogs that I mentioned above. It will save precious time that can be used for development. Once everything is configured, click on Shared Services link on the Central Administration home page. That should lead to the following page: http://.../_admin/managessp.aspx An alternate route to this page is ‘Central Administration > Application Management > Manage this Farm's Shared Services’. Irrespective of the route, following site will open upon clicking on ShareServices. http://.../ssp/admin/default.aspx This is the SSP Administration application. This is the place where we configure Excel Services. Following are main tasks that can be performed by clicking on links underneath’ Excel Services Settings’:
- Edit Excel Services settings.
- Trusted file locations
- Trusted data connection libraries
- Trusted data providers
- User-defined function assemblies
Use ‘Edit Excel Services settings’ page for setting properties that directly affect the security related issues. Microsoft does not recommend following combination of settings:
- Anonymous access to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
- You have a UNC trusted location and the Process account is turned on.
You can also use these settings to proactively deny service or avoid any eavesdropping. I suggest that you read Excel Services Best Practices on TechNet if you are planning to deploy an Intranet application. In my case, I mostly work on Intranet site within a selected group. It is worth spending time on MS sample reports before putting on the actual development hat. This report did not work for me. I was getting Access Denied error. Guess why? Sample reports use workbook that was not in the trusted location. So click on the Trusted File locations link. That will open the following page: http://.../ssp/admin/_layouts/ExcelServerTrustedLocations.aspx A trusted file location can be a document library, a UNC path, or an HTTP Web site. Note that Excel Services will not open any workbook that is not stored in trusted file location. In my case, I gave the address of a parent site and trusted Trust child libraries or directories by checking the checkbox. In real world, it can be configured in any manner. For the purpose of my forth-coming demo, I did not play with any other settings. I plan to have fun and write on all other settings in due course of time. SharePoint 2007 has also introduced a new SharePoint library known as Data Connection Library. This library is just like any other document library and is used for keeping and managing connection files. It is a good practice to add data connection libraries that Excel workbooks access. I did not do anything with Trusted Data Providers, since it was auto-configured for me. I guess it read all data providers registered on the server. I need to read up on that. I will share my experience with others in case of any interesting discoveries. I was happy to see MSOLAP providers in that list. Since I plan to use those in my BI demo application. It was a nice quick and dirty application. I had an Excel application showing the results of a cube from a SQL Server Analysis Services. I published that workbook on the web to show the data to my team. Well! This concludes my blog entry on Excel Services configuration. I am very excited and pumped up. Microsoft has done a great job to introduce Excel Services along with its impressive controls. I can see a lot happening with this technology in future, and I want to be an active part of that future. So, let the journey begin…
About iagha
"Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.” Rumi